These last four weeks have been so charged with anxiety—not only, or even chiefly, war anxieties—that I have not made so much as a single entry in this diary. In fact there has been nothing to record. The poor little garden; its flowers; its weeds; the copse surrounding it; the entire mise-en-scène, with all the quips and jests which in sunnier hours it gives rise to, seems to have vanished bodily. It is as though the whole thing, erstwhile not without its own little importance, had dwindled to the size of one of those infinitesimal specks, which one sometimes sees in feverish dreams; specks so dim and small, so well-nigh invisible, that one wonders how in the first place one ever discovered them, and why, having done so, one should take the trouble of trying to keep them in sight. That being the case it is as well that I am leaving home to-morrow for several weeks, and, since I shall be chiefly in London, have a good excuse for leaving the garden diary, like the garden itself, behind me. Possibly, by the time I return to them, the old, now submerged, landmarks may have risen once more to the surface, or I may have grown a little better used to this changed landscape; seeing that we all have to get used to every variety of landscape; every admixture of weather; every cruel, blinding storm; every rain-washed shore, or bitter, wreck-strewn sea, which meets us in this very odd journey that we call our lives.
Christmas-day, 1899
THERE was a slight sprinkling of snow this morning, yet the garden looks exceedingly black. Save for a scarce discernible white line here and there, everything in it seems stiff, and hard, and black as iron; crumpled iron leaves against an iron floor. Black is the livery, not alone of sorrow, but of dismay, so that the garden does very well just now to wear it. There are moments in the individual life, moments, so it appears, even in an entire nation’s life, when the ordinary scheme of things seems to dissolve and change; when all the familiar landmarks for the time being melt away, and disappear under our eyes.
Standing here, staring blankly out of the window, I feel myself for the moment a sort of embodiment of all the other, vacant-eyed starers out of windows, up and down over the face of the country this Christmas morning. How many of them there must be! How many must be staring down at the dull ground, and telling themselves they will never care to walk in, or to look at their gardens again. It may not be an actual garden, but at least it will be a figurative one; some special plot of happiness; some quarter-acre of habitual enjoyment. I hope, indeed I feel sure, that in the great majority of cases they will sooner or later enjoy it again. Father Time is at bottom a kindly creature, kindlier than when in trouble we are inclined to believe him to be. For the moment however the idea seems unrealisable, and would scarcely be welcome if it were realised.
For hardly-pressed humanity there is, I believe, only one really satisfactory way of dealing with misfortune, which is—to refuse to believe in it! That is, I find, the method that our excellent Cuttle in the garden has adopted with regard to most of the recent events in South Africa. Anything exceptionally disagreeable, especially anything that has to do with the surrender of Englishmen, no matter under what circumstances, he simply declines to believe in. It is not that he is ignorant. He reads his paper diligently; he knows everything that is in it, but he refuses to accept more of the contents than he considers proper. When, a few weeks ago, the first of our Natal mishaps occurred, and the number of English prisoners captured was posted up in the village hall, Cuttle informed me the next morning that he had seen it, but that there wasn’t a word of truth in it! I demurred, but he stuck to his guns steadily. It was the same last Monday, when I saw him for the first time after our two most recent misfortunes, that of the Modder and the Tugela.
“This is bad news, Cuttle,” I said, as we met outside the greenhouse.
“Well ma’am, they do try to make it out to be baddish, but I wouldn’t believe it, if I was you.”
“But it is in all the papers, Cuttle.”
“Very likely it is ma’am, but what of that? I don’t hold with none of those papers. They must be a-stuffing themselves out with something.”
“But I’m afraid the generals admit it themselves.”